The Reel Deal by Patricia Furnish

Hot Coffee (2011)

First-time director and former trial lawyer Susan Saladoff directed and
produced an advocacy documentary film that serves as a tutorial on the
malfunctions of the U.S. criminal justice system.

She focuses on aspects of so-called “tort reform,” a pejorative term to
some people interviewed in the film (one person even refused to say it),
which means changes to the area of civil litigation that deals with personal
injury and monetary compensation. In the current political climate, the issue
is highly partisan.

The central concern of Saladoff is that the U.S. public grossly
misunderstands or is ignorant of basic aspects of the judicial system.

She uses four examples, in the form of “case files,” to explore the harm
that such ignorance does to the citizenry.

First is one of the “greats” in popular culture and the basis for the
film’s title, the woman who sued McDonald’s because the coffee she purchased
burned her.

Viewers will likely compare their awareness of the case to those depicted
in the film’s “man-on-the-street” interviews. Saladoff educates viewers about
the facts of the case, and, with one particular evidentiary photo that I will
*never* forget, her point is well-taken.

People in the film, as proxies for the larger vacuity of our understanding
on the subject, speak with confidence that they know the case was a signature
example of the “frivolous lawsuit.”

Saladoff reveals that we, in fact, do not know the facts of the case and,
perhaps worse, have been primed to use such terms as “frivolous lawsuit” and
“tort reform” by such conservative wordsmiths as Frank Luntz, promoter of the
terms “death tax” and “climate change.” We repeat these phrases, taking
positions of outrage about the current culture of litigiousness and greed
without having performed due diligence.

The remainder of the film explores other facets of our malfunctioning
criminal justice system with three other representative cases. One involves a
medical malpractice lawsuit and caps on damages, another is on an election
campaign and the subsequent prosecution of a judge from Mississippi, and a
final case addresses sexual assault and binding employment contracts that
require mandatory arbitration instead of a trial.

The last “case file” from the film is worth discussing further. Those
viewers who are predisposed to rally to Saladoff’s call to action should take
her advice and investigate further, even if she did not.

Jamie Leigh Jones’ case against Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) has had a
particularly disturbing afterlife since the release of Hot Coffee. The
truth is more elusive than the documentary would have us believe.

Opponents of the U.S. invasion and war in Iraq may loathe corporate
privatization of many aspects of the war effort. KBR is a delectable morsel,
too, since former Vice President Dick Cheney served as Halliburton’s vice
president in 1995. KBR was its subsidiary until 2006.

Mother Jones reporter Stephanie Mencimer decided to investigate the
evidence in the Jones case after she left a screening of Hot
Coffee.

The documentary can have that effect upon viewers.
We, too, should be spurred to know more about the factual details of these
high-profile cases.

Mencimer has uncovered that the documentary itself failed to achieve the
standards it asks viewers to aspire to. Mencimer wrote in her 2013 article on
the case, “When I talked to Susan Saladoff in 2012 about the possibility that
Jones wasn’t entirely truthful, she expressed disbelief. She hadn’t examined
the trial evidence, but she had spent hours with Jones and found her totally
believable.”

Hot Coffee performs a civic duty by asking us to reconsider what we
think we know about the justice system and the cases that enter the system,
as well as those that never can.

It is easy to seek information that confirms what we already think is
true. Otherwise, we would have to admit we were wrong.

However, these four cases are not created equal, and we should approach
them with skepticism. That is what Saladoff is asking of us, the citizen
jury.